The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

Author:Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska [Karp, Alexander C. & Zamiska, Nicholas W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2025-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

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In his book Expert Political Judgment, published in 2005, Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, recounted being shown a demonstration in the 1970s that “pitted the predictive abilities of a classroom of Yale undergraduates against those of a single Norwegian rat.” The challenge was to determine on which side of a small maze, left or right, a piece of food would be hidden. The experimenters would place food on the left side of the maze 60 percent of the time and the right side 40 percent of the time using a randomized selection process. The Yale students watched the rat attempt to ferret out the food, puzzling over potential patterns and grander schemes that might have lurked behind its placement. The rat, however, simply wanted to eat. And it turns out, the rat, not the undergraduates, was better at predicting where the food would be.

As Tetlock explained, the human mind was bested by the animal in the maze study “because we are, deep down, deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error.” The search for grand theories, for underlying systems and mechanisms of action in the world, in any other number of domains, from physics to medicine, has provided us with an enormous advantage, Tetlock acknowledged. Eugene Wigner, a theoretical physicist who was born in Budapest in 1902, famously observed the “uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts.” But that same drive for systematic theories of the world, for coherence at the expense of an effective muddle, has also left us with a persistent blind spot and resistance to embracing the instruction that the universe provides, even if its internal logic may be beyond us.

Tetlock’s broader interest and project involved testing the accuracy of predictions made by political experts when confronted with questions about developments in global affairs. He and his team solicited and compiled a total of 27,451 forecasts made by experts starting in the 1980s, covering a range of political questions from the fate of the Soviet Union, whether South Africa would continue to maintain minority rule, and if Quebec would secede from Canada. Tetlock was interested in assessing which experts, among his panel, would be able to “ ‘beat’ the dart-throwing chimp” in making predictions about future historical events. It turns out that the 284 experts, that is, the academics and policy wonks selected to participate in Tetlock’s study over the course of nearly two decades, did not generally fare better than chance. Some of the nearly three hundred experts, however, did outperform.

Tetlock had divided his specialists into groups of thinkers—foxes and hedgehogs—based on their responses to survey questions regarding the way that they approached intellectual challenges and problem-solving. And the foxes won.

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